onrup

Safety and governance

Data provenance

What is data provenance?

Data provenance is the record of where each training example came from, when, and under what permission. It is what allows a specific model behaviour to be traced back to its cause, and what allows a licensing question to be answered without guesswork.

Provenance becomes urgent at exactly the wrong moment: when a customer asks whether their data was used, when a model produces something it should not have, or when a licence question arrives from a lawyer. None of those are answerable retrospectively without records kept in advance.

The practical form is a per-record trail — source, timestamp, transformation applied, and whether the record was generated or collected — carried alongside the dataset rather than in someone’s memory.

Related terms

All terms in the glossary →

Start with the free tier

A magic link creates your account, your tenant and your first API key. No card until you ask for compute.